Dec 16: Christmas All Day and Night

Aside from a quick afternoon nap, this day was a 12-hour celebration of the season! 

We didn't mean to mean to end up with three exciting Christmas outings on the same day, but we didn't want to miss any of them either. 

So we spent the morning at the candy factory with some favorite friends, the afternoon at Teacher Anne's house for the class party, and the evening getting pizza and walking the Trail of Lights with other favorite friends.

Hammond's Candy Factory was really fun and such a cool place to spend a morning. It has been in operation since 1920, even making a profit during the Great Depression - because, as they say on their website, people needed candy more then than ever. Now that they've developed a national market, you might see their famous, gorgeous candy canes in high-end stores like Whole Foods. They still make their candy mostly by hand, using antique equipment that has, in some cases, been retrofitted with motors. But as you watch through the big glass windows, you see a scene reminiscent of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory - smiling men and women in white caps, stretching and cutting the candy, all by hand. If they had all started singing "Oompa, Loompa..." it would have seemed strangely appropriate.

We met three of Isaac's school friends that morning, plus one younger sibling - Bella, Benji, Sadie and her brother Ezra. The kids were pretty content roaming around the front room together while we waited for our tour to start. And waited...The factory is overwhelmed with visitors in December, and we were probably there an hour before it was our turn. 

 

Finally they led our small group, along with an enormous group of schoolkids and their rather forbidding chaperones, into this room to see a movie that explained what was unique about the candy-making process at Hammond's. Theme: handmade. 

The teacher in me was horrified when the schoolkids started chattering with excitement at the sight of an onscreen vat of rich chocolate - and the lead teacher whisper-yelled at them to "Be quiet!" This happened a couple of times. What a crank. I hope he doesn't crush all their joy. The parents were just as grim. We're in a candy factory! At Christmas! I think they needed a Willy Wonka consequence.

As we continued down the hall behind our tour guide, I caught Isaac and his best buddy Sadie holding hands. 

Benji and Bella are pretty inseparable as well. And Jonah was right there with the big kids.

When we finished the tour, everyone got a free candy cane, and then we walked out into the best candy store I have ever seen. Baskets of candy canes, coiled lollipops and curly ribbons so rich in color and almost supple in texture that they were works of art. A wall lined with glass, self-serve containers filled with all varieties of candy. A glass case full of chocolate truffles. It was a treat for the eyes first. We made some purchases and then spent a good 15 minutes outside while the boys circled up the stairs and down this ramp, giggling all the while until Jonah pitched forward and landed on his face...Then it was time to go.  

For the adults, Teacher Anne made the most incredible gourmet pizzas I've ever had. For the kids, she'd set up a make-your-own pizza station, and she'd posted a list so each family could bring an ingredient. 

Isaac drew some praise my way for piling a huge heap of spinach on top of his pepperoni pizza, and then of course eating every bite.
Poor Jonah's pizza was temporarily lost, and I spent about half an hour holding an increasingly frantic child who kept asking me, "Where my pizza?" Lately he has started suffering from low blood sugar, like Adam, if he waits too long to eat. He then gets to a point where he becomes inconsolable and refuses to take the one thing he needs. At these times, he will throw food on the floor before putting it in his mouth. The only way I can break the cycle is to act like I'm going to eat his food - only then does he take it from me and put a small amount in his mouth. Usually it just takes that first bite entering his body to snap him out of it enough to take a second bite, then another. Then I breathe a sigh of relief and take a sip of my wine. Yes, there was wine. Teacher Anne made it clear that this would be a party for the adults too. 

And that brings me to just how awesome Teacher Anne is. Homemade, incredible pizza for us; pizza-making for the kids; a holiday-themed craft table; and, as she'd promised the kids, a little sledding hill in the backyard with an assortment of sleds.
Once the kids discovered it, the sledding became the highlight of the party. The hill was small enough that the four-year-olds could sled completely independently, and they generally did a great job sharing, often riding together and ending up in piles of laughing kids.

Louis, below, is one of Isaac's favorites. 

And here is Isaac in a pileup under a large bush with his two best boy buddies, Louis and Colton, after they had ridden down all in one sled. 

Isaac and Sadie took turns on this red sled, sometimes riding together and sometimes racing down to pull the other one back up for the next ride. 

This moment lasted less than a minute, but it was pretty cute. 

Most of the class gets along so well, and most of the kids are so good-natured, especially compared to last year's overload of aggressive boys. However, there are still a couple with a mean streak. After taking pictures of the sledders, I went around to the deck to check on Jonah, who had been walking slowly to join us. I found him on a step, with two big four-year-old boys standing over him. They had taken his water bottle and were holding it upside-down over him, slowly dripping water down the arm of his shirt. He had a stoic expression on his face, not giving them the pleasure of a reaction. Points for him. But they were obviously messing with him, and something about their expressions was just plain cruel. When they saw me, one of the pair said: "His mom's coming!" and they both left the scene as fast as they could. I give Teacher Anne a lot of credit for her loving toughness with all the kids. There is none of this behavior in school this year.

After this experience, Jonah was cold and cranky, and it was well past his nap anyway. He was asleep within minutes in his carseat, and he had a quick rest at home before it was time to meet our friends at a pizza restaurant south of Denver. We had plans to see the Trail of Lights, a path lit by Christmas lights through the woods of Chatfield, the Denver Botanic Gardens' much larger suburban outpost. 

It was a long drive in traffic, and we were quite late as we drove into an enormous and almost completely full parking lot in the middle of the monotonous south Denver suburbs. Finally, we sat down at a long table with Brandy, Sean, Ewan and Holden and ordered some pizza. Isaac and Ewan laughed like crazy people through much of the meal.
 

The night was cold and getting colder, but the lights were really beautiful. We walked the path, crossing bridges and skirting groves of trees. Adam took all the following Christmas-light photos with his camera phone.

Poor Jonah ...It's so hard to find mittens that fit two-year-olds. With his hands colder by the minute, we stopped at the little hot chocolate hut. Here are the four cold boys awaiting their treat.

This is another shot from Adam's phone: hot chocolate with marshmellows. Somehow, though I'm sure it was anything but natural, this was some really good hot chocolate. I wrapped my hands around the cup and breathed in the steam. Isaac got his own, but Jonah shared mine - and he wanted more, and more, and more. I could hardly take a sip before he was reaching for his next one.

Ewan and Holden liked theirs too.

We ended the night in front of the fire pit. It made us warm in front...but the night was frigid, and our backs stayed cold. Isaac and Ewan were huddled together, watching the fire and enjoying every sip of chocolate. 

Here I am snuggling and trading sips with Jonah.We stayed long enough to finish our drinks, then headed to the car as fast as we could. That is, as fast as we could once our four-year-old finished a leisurely bathroom stop while Jonah and I waited by the door aching with cold...What a day. Ups and downs. Exhausting. But overall pretty awesome. 

Dec 9: Homemade Ravioli

I've always wanted to try making pasta at home. In fall and winter, our fridge is often full of pureed pumpkin that needs to be used, so I decided to make pumpkin ravioli for dinner. When Isaac heard this, he could wait to help, so we did this together. He mixed the ingredients, blended the pesto, then helped cut out the ravioli with a biscuit cutter. Together we spooned the pumpkin puree onto the little circles of dough, closed them, and sealed them up with water. This is the result above: a little thicker than pasta should be, but not bad for the first try!

For a dinner this pretty, we had to set the table and eat in the dining room of course. Sadly, after all the effort, the texture was not Isaac's favorite. He was happy when dinner was over and he could move on to the gingerbread house he'd made at school, which he shared piece by piece with each of us, doling out his treasure carefully.

Jonah preferred the gingerbread house too. Oh well - it still made for a fun night!

Nov 27: Isaac's First Off-Broadway Musical!

The way Isaac is utterly mesmerized by a good story or beautiful music, I couldn't stop thinking about the Lion King coming to the Performing Arts Center - breathtaking music, a compelling story, and the pageantry of this production - the staging and the costumes - would be magic for him.

So with this in mind, and embracing the idea of experience over another toy to take up space in the house, Adam and I gave Isaac a day with us as his Christmas present this year. Lunch, and then an outing downtown to see his first musical. We would dress up, of course, to make it extra-special.

Isaac seemed excited but apprehensive. I think he was worried because I'd told him they would turn out the lights when the performance started. I tried to prepare him for what it would look like inside the theater, and I tried to explain a little theater etiquette so it wouldn't all seem so strange. We sat at my computer for an hour in the morning, while Adam and Jonah slept, listening to clips (I-Tunes wouldn't let me buy, for some reason) of every song from the soundtrack and discussing what was happening in the story at that point. He was mesmerized just by the clips of the songs and had lots of questions. He was already being pulled into the story. That was good.

We tried to take a picture of the three of us before we left, but he was still a little unsure, hiding in the background.

Kelly was here to take care of Jonah, who seemed completely unfazed by the sight of his whole family getting in the car and going somewhere without him. I'd tried to prepare him too, and he was the one kicking us out the door when we needed to leave. "Dada, get in the car," he ordered. He waved happily as we drove away.

Isaac wanted to eat at Mona's, a breakfast and lunch restaurant nearby that he has loved since he was a baby. Every time we go, he gets the teddy bear pancakes. They come with chocolate chips and powdered sugar, and I suppose it's a great departure from what he gets at home. I'm grateful for the generous side of melon, which he loves possibly more than the pancake itself.

Mona's has a chalkboard lining one wall so customers can draw if they are inspired. 

We were all excited as we arrived downtown and saw families everywhere, dressed up and holding the hands of small girls in flouncy dresses and boys in button-down shirts, all moving toward the performing arts center. Isaac was excited as we found our seats and heard the excited buzz of conversation around us. As we waited for the lights to dim, I showed him the stage, the curtains, the box seats, and his favorite, the orchestra pit. He was amazed that the space under the stage could hold a whole orchestra and their instruments - that there were real people under there!

As I had hoped, Isaac was mesmerized from the beginning. The music, the lights, the costumes, the story, the whole experience - the theater was certainly magic for this little boy. He could follow the story pretty well, but he needed lots of clarification - so we had our heads together, whispering about plot and characters, for much of the time. By the time intermission came, he was ready for a break. We stood out on the balcony and watched the people walking below us. It was a beautiful, chilly fall day.

It was only at the end of the almost three-hour show that Isaac's attention started to wane. By then we could tell him, "Watch, it's almost over, and it's about to get exciting again. Simba has to go back and fight Scar so he can be king." And Isaac, snuggled up on our laps by this point, so still I had to check if his eyes were closed, made it through the end of the show, still attentive.

When we got home, Isaac started telling Jonah all about the theater, the orchestra pit, the lions, and the plot of the musical, hardly taking a breath. Jonah stared at him for a minute and then started talking about something else, having no idea what he was talking about. But I smiled to see that, over the next few weeks, the Lion King was present in Isaac's invented games, over and over.

Update: Santa brought Isaac a CD in his stocking, the soundtrack to the Lion King musical. A few weeks later, once we finally got the CD player working on his laptop, Isaac sat mesmerized once again by the music alone. For a week now, he has been sitting in the family room, staring at a motionless screen with nothing but the name of the song on it, reliving the story from the first song to the last. He plays the whole CD and then starts it over again. And when I mentioned that I'd heard the performing arts center has a theater camp for kids his age in the summer, and he might get to see the stage where the actors performed the Lion King, he was jumping up and down with excitement.

Dec 8: Jonah's School

Jonah started school in October, once he had turned two. It's a cute little in-home preschool that consists of one highly-trained, hard-working, meticulous, loving teacher and a total of six kids. Above is Ms. Mira and her two-year-old son Sam, plus four-year-old Henry, both in Jonah's class.

The first day I dropped Jonah off, he didn't cry or talk but just watched me leave, expressionless. Tough little guy. Mira said he asked about me now and then, but he seemed to know I was coming back. I was near tears, but it was much better than the first time I did this - walking away from a sobbing, two-year-old Isaac. When I came back three hours later to get Jonah, his face lit up as he said "Mama!" and ran into my arms. The next day when I dropped him off, he again watched me go but never cried.  For the first few weeks, when Mira asked the kids at pickup time if their day had been happy, sad or okay, Jonah continued to pick sad, even when it sounded like he'd been smiling and playing pretty well. 

Now, two months later, Jonah says "I have happy!" when asked to rate his day. He asks to go to school each week, and he names all the kids he's going to play with there. They have Morning Meeting, centers, snack, and they finish each morning with outside time with lots of toys. It's been a wonderful first school.

Dec 7: Preschool Social Life

The Frog class plays really well together, and we moms get along really well too. So almost every afternoon, three times a week, many of us find ourselves just hanging around on the playgroup while our kids play - the big kids zipping around and climbing, wrestling, and inventing complex games that we can only begin to understand; the little siblings following them with choppy baby gaits and then watching from a distance when it gets too physical.  When the winter sun drops too low, the air gets cold fast, and that's usually the cue to head home. Or someplace warm.

Once a month, we now have a standing dinner playdate at Ernie's, a local restaurant with pizza and skeeball. We did this for the first time in December, and the preschoolers were a happy gang of playmates.

Below is Isaac between his friends Sadie and Benji.

And here is another favorite, Colton, with his sister and brother.

We spent a few hours at Ernie's that night. The kids were happy, and the grownups got to hang out at a bar and drink good local beer.

Dec 4: Decorating the Tree!

This was the first year that Isaac could really help decorate. We took turns hanging ornaments, and Isaac is so tall now that he could reach about halfway to the top! Jonah quickly figured out that he couldn't make the ornaments stay on, so he carried them around instead. Both boys were excited to see their little singing ornaments Deeda had sent last Christmas - a bear for Jonah and a penguin for Isaac.

Once Jonah started to get bored, Adam read books with him while Isaac and I finished decorating.

I never could get a good Christmas tree picture of the boys until that night, but then they posed willingly, and I got three cute ones!